Rewriting Conveyancing: A 10-Year Transformative Plan for A Booming Industry

This is the recommendation Professor Richard Susskind told conveyancers at the Conveyancing Association conference in the UK. He urged the industry to begin planning their future, with nothing else than a ‘blank sheet of paper’.

Entrenched

‘The sense I get from chatting to people is that improvement is going to be of a mild, evolutionary sort’, Susskind remarked. ‘I’m not suggesting we should be revolutionary. What I argue for is what I call incremental transformation. If we assembled 10 years from now, I really do think that conveyancing would be radically different’, he explained.

Emboldened

Remaining consistent to his transformative perspective on the legal service sector, Susskind is known in the law circles for being the one to admit that it is hard to convince a room full of millionaires that they have got their business model wrong. He suggests that conveyancing should look ‘radically different’ within a decade, but it would be a mistake to think that it would be achievable through ‘leisurely evolution’.

‘It won’t be through switching on a completely new system, but through five or six incremental changes that will transform the process. A leisurely evolution is not going to do it’, he said. ‘You should have a project where you begin with a blank sheet of paper. People often say you can’t start with a blank sheet of paper. I say the reverse’.

Prescribing a straightforward means to achieve progress within the conveyancing industry, Susskind told the professionals in attendance to “gather together and ask: ‘If we were designing the system from scratch, what would it be like?’ What you will then have is your 10-year vision.”